All hail to Netscroll

That mouse in your right hand - do you ever remember how annoying they used to be?

I remember my last mouse. Every few weeks I'd be getting a pair of tweezers or a nail file and attempt to scrub off that "crud" that gets inside the rolly-bits inside the mouse.

My Netscroll mouse - which I've had for a couple of years now - still has that problem. The difference is that is is actually designed for the user to open it up with a screwdriver and clean it properly.

This has meant that cleaning the inside of the mouse has been easy. No fiddling around in tiny spaces, you simply take off the top and the rolly bits are there for you to clean.

But just recently I was having trouble with the middle-button - you know the scroll wheel that many mice have? Well, once every revolution, I was now finding that the screen would go "up" rather than go down as I was commanding it to.

Well. I have just fixed it up. The scroll wheel was easily removed from the mouse and I was able to blow away some dust and crud that had got in the way of some optical trigger thingy on the printed circuit board. Now it works fine.

I have to say that I thoroughly enjoy having manufacturers anticipate and plan ahead on things like this. It had never occurred to me that I could clean the scroll wheel - but now that I have done it for the first time, I am happy that the makers anticipated this and made it easy for me to do.